When I started investigating how to move to Denmark, I gave myself a deadline of 6 months to my date of departure. That’s not because I needed 6 months to get ready, but because that’s how long I thought it would take me to fill out the visa form.

Reading government documents is hard. I can read a novel for hours, but I’ll spend 2 minutes reading the first page of a form over and over again, without comprehension, before I give up out of exhaustion.

I’m writing this out because getting all this information was a huge struggle for me, and I hope someone else can benefit from it.

Working Holiday

I succeeded in applying for the simplest Danish visa you can get. That’s the working holiday. You can have that one if you’re under 35 and can prove you have at least $3500 in your bank account to support yourself during your first months in Denmark. You have to present yourself in person at the Danish/Norwegian embassy in Vancouver and pay around $700 in fees.

The visa application isn’t a simple PDF form. It’s an “internet portal” with a series of webforms that you have to fill out and can save for later, although the saving function is dodgy. You need to have scans of your documents, such as passport, travel insurance, and bank statements, to submit to the form.

With that visa, you can work for 6 months, study for 6 months, and stay for a year total. You can take Danish lessons for free, and they give you a social security number and health insurance card when you arrive. In your first week, you are supposed to report to the commune, basically city hall, and that’s when they sign you up for Danish lessons and the health card.

The health insurance card has the address and telephone number of your personal doctor written on it, and you can make an appointment to see them using their website. You don’t have to pay anything. You do have to have travel health insurance from your own country, though, to meet the visa requirements.

This is the visa that’s simple enough for teenage stoners who want to be baristas in Christiania and get high for a year. If you want to stay longer than that, you need an AR-1 or an FA-1.

This is a residency permit you can get if you have a job. It’s good for one year and you can reapply. All you need to apply for it is a signed contract with your employer, stating the details of your employment, including date of hire, length of contract (or whether it’s a permanent job), any other benefits they offer like maternity leave, holiday, company car, etc.

Danish employers don’t need to pay a fee to import you or anything, and there is a JobCenter in each municipality where there are people who are supposed to help you get hired. They’re not much smarter than job center employees anywhere else, but they can help you write a resume, point you to some job boards and sometimes they have hiring fairs.

I applied to ten or twenty jobs and wasn’t hired, so my information is not necessarily the best in this area. But the key things I learned are that 1) if it’s a low skill or “easy” job, generally a Dane will be hired for it because Danes are kind of racist and they all have nephews who need jobs. This is the same everywhere on earth, of course.

However, if you are an engineer, they want you. Electrical, chemical engineers, manufacturing, mechanical, and software engineers are so hot that they’re the subjects of national advertising campaigns. This is true everywhere on earth as well.

If you can’t manage to be an engineer, try being a programmer. Stick to C#, C++, C, and Assembly, and you might get somewhere. Tradesmen are mostly not wanted, but medical techs are.

There are huge employers like Maersk, Danfoss and Lego, and they do hire a lot of people. But if send your application to one of these no one will ever see it. Try finding a company making weird little microcontrollers tucked away in an office park somewhere. You might have better luck there.

In my case, I’m a programmer but I can’t seem to convince employers that I can learn C# on the job. I had a remote job with an American company, and I wasn’t sure whether the immigration people would buy that. However, if you read page 16 of the AR-1 form, you’ll see this section: “16.C Information about the applicant’s salary when seconded to Denmark by a foreign-based company “.

It seems to imply that your company is requiring you to live in Denmark, which is not the case for remote work. But nothing specific in that section rules out remote work.

It took me many months to gain this information, because I read the forms several times without actually taking the information in. I’m not sure what went wrong with my brain, but I’m back in Canada kicking myself for it.

When you drill down into that list, you’ll find that the requirements are quite lax. For example, you have to have a stronger attachment to Denmark than any other country. This means that you cannot have spent more than 6 months in a country besides Denmark in the past year. So if you spent a year on a working holiday visa, you meet that requirement. If you lived with your partner for that year, you could, for example, take an education for 6 months until you’ve cohabited for 18 months, and you’ll meet the cohabitation requirement. Protip – if your Danish lover asks you to marry him, don’t stall him with bullshit about how “marriage is a social construct” while you try to squint through a crystal ball into the future. Just say yes.

You also have to pass a Danish language test. It’s the A1 test, which is the easiest level they have. Relevant to me personally, “If you are blind, deaf or have some other form of disability that prevents you from taking the exam, you might not need to take the exam.” I’m deaf, and being deaf sure does make it difficult to pass an oral language exam.

The toughest part of this visa is that your Danish partner needs to put up 50,000kr in escrow with the municipality, in case you need social services while you’re there. You can have the money back eventually.

If you can pull it off, I think this is a great way to go. Danes are always travelling the world since they take 6 weeks of vacation every year, and they always spend it outside of Denmark because every other place on earth is cheaper. So you tend to run into them on beaches, hiking trails and in tourist bars, and they’re very easy to fall in love with. Just follow one home.

Good luck – Denmark is a strange place, but it will capture your heart.

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I worked remotely this year. It’s interesting. The flexible schedule and workspace is great, but the lack of interaction with your co-workers leaves you questioning yourself and your sanity.

Communication has to be very proactive – you can’t wait for someone to check if you’re having trouble or need something to do, you have to go ask for it. I think this skill is some kind of dark art, and I haven’t gotten it yet.

Most of my non-fiction reading was about “soft skills”. The little things that ease friction between humans and help us enjoy each other more. I always feel that I’m deficient in those skills, so I look for books that might have answers. These are books that had answers – maybe not complete answers, but they brought me a little closer to being human.

Negotiating the Non-Negotiable, Dan Shapiro

Dan Shapiro gets world leaders and diplomats into a room together and makes them play games about peacemaking. You’d think those people would already be good at negotiating as it’s the centre of their jobs, but he still catches them off guard fairly often. He helped peace talks in Ireland and Bosnia in the 90’s, among other things.

His idea is that intractable disagreements come up when people’s identity feels attacked. Swallowing your pride, shaking hands and signing an agreement may be the logical thing to do, but logic isn’t the only master that humans answer to. If you read my previous posts, you’ll see one about identity that I did as an exercise after reading this book.

If you have to give up part of your identity to make peace, you may decide that peace isn’t worth it. By extension, if you can figure out how you’re threatening someone’s values with your seemingly reasonable proposition, you can better understand why they won’t accept it, and maybe find a compromise.

Works Well With Others, Ross McCammon

Ross McCammon is a senior editor at Esquire magazine. His job, aside from editing, is to schmooze and make the right moves in high-stakes social situations.

This book is about all the ways he’s failed to do that in the last ten years. It starts out as practical advice for when you’ve gotten a job you’re not qualified for and have to fit in with people who seem very, very cool, when you are very, very uncool.

Have you ever felt crippled by self-consciousness when deciding what to order during a business lunch? You shouldn’t, because the lunch is for focussing on the person that you’re with. But here’s some guidelines for getting past the mechanical aspects of picking your food, talking to the waiter and reaching for the bill as smoothly as possible so that you can pay attention to what matters. Also, what should you say when you interview Rihanna? Also a good question. In this case, asking about the house she grew up in as a child got her talking.

The advice gets less practical and more funny as the book goes on. I loved the part where Ross talks about a bench in Central Park where he used to hide after turning in an assignment. He had a thought in the back of his mind, “They can’t fire me for it if they can’t find me.”

After ten years, he doesn’t need the bench as much, but still goes back sometimes to remember what it was like.

The Art of Asking, Amanda Palmer

Amanda Palmer reminds me of the reason I haven’t written as much this year. Art only works when you’re being really, really honest. As soon as you try to hide yourself, creativity dries up.

Amanda stands on a box wearing a baroque wedding gown and holds a flower out to passersby, and only moves if someone puts money in her hat. It’s the most vulnerable thing she can do – stand in public and beg, with her whole being, “please notice me”.

Rocketships.ca is my email address and goes on every resume I send out. I don’t know how many employers get around to reading my blog. It’s gotten me a couple of interviews, but how many have I scared off? I want to write the really raw, horrifyingly funny stuff, but not end up unemployed because of it. But I know if this blog is ever going to be anything but a minor hobby that a few friends read, I’m going to have to go deep like Amanda does.

The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman

My mom read this book when I was a small kid and has been telling me to check it out ever since. I finally felt the need for it after tearfully explaining to my therapist that I couldn’t figure out how to tell my partner how much I loved him, or get him to believe me when I tried. It’s a book that found me when I was ready to listen.

My love language is Quality Time. The others are Words of Affirmation, Physical Touch, Receiving Gifts, and Acts of Service. I have a feeling that the guy is right, and if you can figure out what your partner’s language is, you’ll have a better time.

Boss Life: Surviving My Own Small Business, Paul Downs

Paul Downs makes custom, specialized conference tables in Pennsylvania. Most of his customers find him on Google, and everything they sell is produced in a huge warehouse by a dozen or so woodworkers.

They do beautiful work and fully occupy their market niche. There’s plenty of demand for what they make – so why do they lose money? In 2011, Downs kept a month by month account of what happened.

He fixed their sales process so they’d stop leaking customers. He demoted a shop foreman who had served, resentfully, for over 20 years, and promoted a less experienced guy who wanted the job and cared enough to do it well. He went to the Middle East to look for customers, but found that there were plenty of customers right at home – after he caught and fixed a Google adwords bug that was putting his ads in front of the wrong eyeballs. At the end of the year, he finished with just enough cash to stay in business – he didn’t get to collect a salary, he only paid himself back for loans he’d put into the business.

It’s a story that will put you off the idea of starting your own business, for sure, unless you happen to have the kind of mind that hears about these problems and thinks, “oh, that sounds fun!” I took lots of notes.

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In a conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that identity is fluid and constantly in motion. Some parts may be fixed, but others are negotiable. However, when your identity is threatened, you hunker down in self-defence and think of it as a single, immutable whole. You demand that the other party agree to your perspectives, your sense of right and wrong, your values. But if the other side holds the same egoistic assumption, you get stuck in an ever-escalating impasse, until your conflict feels intractable.

This description comes from “Negotiating the Non-Negotiable”, by Dan Shapiro. His examples of feeling “stuck” when your identity is attacked strongly remind me of the “stuck” feeling that plagued me during my time in Denmark – and at lots of other times in my life. Based on the idea that maybe I felt that my identity was under attack, I’m going to go through Shapiro’s Five Pillars of Identity and figure out who I am. Bearing in mind that identity is fluid and none of the things I write down here need to be absolute immutable truth.

Not sure what the difference is between beliefs and values, but otherwise I’ll give this a bash.

What do I believe in?Taking personal responsibility for my success and wellbeing. To me that means educating myself and making sure I can make a good living, not wasting time or money but using it wisely and conservatively.

Keeping my word once I’ve given it (even if it’s only implied). Being a reliable person that others can count on.

Telling the truth. Using the guidelines “is it true, is it kind, is it necessary” – I don’t need to say everything that is true, but I do need to only say things that are true.

Not everyone is as capable of being as self-reliant as I am, and I don’t require it. Therefore I’m happy to pay taxes or donate to charity to help others who aren’t doing as well. However I believe in taking care of myself first, so as not to put other people in the position of having to cover for me.

I am capable of learning all the skills I need to be healthy and successful. “I can’t” isn’t a valid excuse. I can do things.

I have enough self-discipline to accomplish whatever I set out to do.

Rituals

Christmas and Thanksgiving with family, New Year’s Eve with friends whenever possible. (strengthens my network and community ties)

Morning coffee and breakfast. Read with breakfast. (start the day off right and get in a healthy mindset)

Cooking at home, big, cheap and healthy meals, trying new stuff in the kitchen for entertainment. (self improvement and being healthy)

Riding my bike to work. (same as above)

Gym twice a week. (same as above)

Call my brother a couple times a month, talk to friends a few times a week. (good family relationships)

Turn up at friend’s houses to hang out with them. (strengthen community and network)

Allegiances

I’m not sure about this one. I don’t really feel like I’m part of any particular group. Well, my family for sure, but “Graham” isn’t really a strong identity. We all kinda do our own thing.

“Victorian” for sure. It’ll always be part of me, the good and the bad. Mountains, vegans, MEC, the West Coast Trail, beach fires, bitching about the price of rentals and arguing about bike lanes.

“Danish” – well I was only there for a short time, so maybe not as much, but it was long enough to change the way I look at things. So Danish, yeah.

“Campbell River”. I never loved the place, but I sure am proud to tell people I’m from there. Weird.

“Canadian”. The Boy Scouts of the global economy. Yeah, I’ll take it.

“Cyclist”. Is it still a part of your core identity if you haven’t ridden a bike in weeks? Yes, yes it is. Always.

ValuesEnvironmentalism – reducing waste and pollution through my daily habits. Less concerned about one-off events like flying in a plane or having a campfire, more with things I do every day. Ride bikes more, recycle and compost, use less packaging, drive a fuel-efficient used car, buy quality items that won’t end up in the garbage.

Kindness – make people feel good about being around me. Recognize their contributions verbally and publicly. Never make them feel stupid for not knowing as much as I do, instead take the opportunity to teach (if they’re interested).

Meaningful ExperiencesThat time when I was 10 and the neighbor asked me to water her garden while she was away, and mom did the whole job for me. I think that was the angriest I had ever been at age 10. Left me with a very strong reaction to people trying to do my work for me, implying that I’m not capable of doing it myself. I either react in anger or walk away altogether.

Shane and Dev when I was 18. They invited me over. I was odd as hell and didn’t know how to behave. They accepted me without question and never made me feel weird or out of place. Reinforced that I want to be a person who is welcoming of new people.

Roger at Radar Hill. Trusted my opinion and judgment basically from day one. Never had the slightest interest in blaming anyone when things went wrong, only focused on solutions. A role model.

On Camino, Jette showed up at the hostel and asked if I wanted to walk with her. That was level of vulnerability that I would never have been capable of before I saw that she could do it.

—

I think its good to go through this whenever I feel stuck or in conflict, and think about what part of my identity feels under attack. Like when my mom is being overly helpful and solicitous, and it irritates the hell out of me even though she’s just being herself and doing absolutely nothing wrong. I get irritated because I can do everything myself, and I don’t need her help dammit! The “self-sufficient” part of my identity feels attacked.

Going through this list a couple weeks after I first wrote it, it strikes me that the first things I wrote about were being independent and self-sufficient. I probably would have been like that no matter what, but I think those values were reinforced in the years when I was deaf at school and had no friends to talk to or count on.

It’s a lonely way to live. I’m not sure I want to be like that. That attitude hasn’t helped my relationships and it leads to me being really hard on myself sometimes. Luckily this stuff isn’t set in stone, and I don’t have to give up old values to get new ones – I can build on the old stuff.

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I got a job! I’m working in a print shop. It’s called Japan Camera, and we do sell a few cameras, but it’s mostly about photo prints. I’ve been there for like 4 days now, and it’s legit so much fun.

People come in for passports, I get to take the picture and retouch it. Cool! That makes me a professional photographer, technically! The boss is running the Pics with Santa booth at the mall, which is why I got hired – they needed an extra person in the store while he’s away. I got to help at the Santa booth one day! It was crazy hectic, customers non-stop. I was tracking orders in our book, printing and packaging express prints on the spot, giving people directions to the food court, and making faces at crying toddlers all at the same time.

Most babies and toddlers cry when you hand them over to Santa. The parents are disappointed, but I think those shots are the best. You’ve got perfect focus and framing, bright lighting, and an active, engaged, ALIVE subject. They’re so real. I’m sure everyone wants the perfectly posed shot with two smiling kids sitting quietly, but give me the angry baby trying to escape anytime.

I’ve just spent the last 4 years working in a quiet office where the most excitement we ever got was when Dan brought his dog to work. I love it! I was only there for an hour – maybe it’s less fun if you’re doing it all day, I don’t know. But I’m so glad I get a chance to do it now, just for the next month.

Back in the shop, I do lots of different things – assembling calendars, printing mugs, ringing up orders, all kinds of shop stuff. It’s all simple, yet incredibly challenging when it’s all thrown at you at once. The boss, Ben, says I’m fantastic and that I seem like I know how to do everything already. Feels nice to be appreciated!

I got a car, it’s a 2007 Toyota Matrix with 122k on it – brand new, as far as I’m concerned. It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever bought a car that wasn’t a shitbucket. I got it because I knew I would lose my mind since I’m living with my mom and dad in Royal Oak right now, a million miles from town and up in the hills, and I needed to get out of the house – but I wantedsomething with good resale value too, just in case I get my head straightened out enough to let me go back to Denmark in like, a month.

So I got a Toyota! And now I’m flat broke and can’t afford to move out of mom and dad’s house even if I knew where I wanted to go. The only place I drive besides work is the gym but I go there three times a week.

That’s because I’m actually working two jobs right now. The print shop is 20 hours a week, and the other one is a secret at the moment unfortunately. It’s not an exciting secret or anything, it’s just a temporary remote job that I can’t talk about. But that means I’m working more than 40 hours a week at two different jobs, my free time has evaporated, and I haven’t seen a paycheck yet.

It’s too bad, because before I started work I was trying to hustle up a business idea – fill up a container with Danish Modern furniture provided by my excellent contact in Denmark, and sell it here in Victoria. I went around to the four shops in Victoria that sell that type of thing (and three other shops that are kinda similar) and made friends with the owners. They’re all interested, but all of them told me they can only take a few items, they don’t have inventory space, their customers are very particular, and Vancouver is a much bigger market. They even gave me lists of places I should specifically go check out.

So I’m keen to go to Vancouver and make some more friends there, but like I said, working full time and then some now. Next time I have time off will be after Christmas.

Hopefully, by the time that happens, my contact in Denmark will have started talking to me again and forgiven me for the gigantic asshole I acted like last time I messaged him. He reads my blog, so who knows, it could happen. And that’s where my life is right now – all over the place and no idea what’s happening next.

It was 1:00am when Odin and I finally got to some dinner, samosas in a little Moroccan restaurant next door to our hostel. The conversation was getting silly so I finished with “tak for mad”, intending to get up and go to bed, but I didn’t quite get up.

“You know, all those times you make dinner, I never say tak for mad, do I?” It’s been five months of dinners now, and this is maybe the second time I’ve thought of it. “Do you notice?”

He didn’t answer for long enough to let me know he noticed. “I got used to it.”

Danes always say “Tak for mad” after they eat. It means “thanks for the food”, and everyone old enough to know their own name is expected to say it after every meal. It’s ground into them from a very early age and they never forget and always notice. Except, “But you never say it when I make dinner?”

Odin squinted at me and took another long pause. “Yes, I do. Every single time.”

Crap. So not only have I had lousy manners, I’ve failed to notice his good ones.

The people at the table next to us get up to go, wishing us good night as they leave. They shared their appetizers with us earlier, and the woman has on a U2 concert tshirt. They were at the same show we went to. U2 at the Olympiastadion in Berlin, along with the fifth person in the restaurant, a guy falling asleep in his curry behind the other two. The shop normally closed at midnight, and it seems like the owner kept it open tonight just for us.

The concert started, for us, on the 11th, driving down from Denmark in a cheap car we bought the day before because our usual ride, a diesel Hyundai hatchback, developed an expensive brake problem. It’s a Suzuki Liana, well known for being a Reasonably Priced Car.

Once we found the hostel, the next step was to find a parking spot. I’m from Victoria, where parking is mostly never a problem. Usually I travel on foot or by motorbike, and then it’s even less of a problem. The idea of planning a parking spot in Berlin didn’t occur to me. I asked inside the hostel for suggestions, but the manager started with, “Yeah, parking in Berlin. It’s bad. Here, let me show you the map…”

Bo’s good attitude did not crack during the 15 minute walk, carrying duffel bags, back to the hostel. I took his cue and kept smiling.

At the hostel, I found that my planning had let me down a second time. The room I thought I had booked for two people, was actually a single room.

“Yeah, one room, but two people can fit in it, right?”

“It’s a single bed.”

“Yeah, but…”

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“But I booked it on the website, I swear I entered ‘2 people’ in the form?”

“It says here that there was only one.”

“Look… can I talk to the manager? I’m sure this isn’t right.”

“He’s in Portugal.”

Odin stepped in. “Let’s go outside for a minute.”

We went outside and sat on a low concrete wall, a few feet away from the manager (you know, the one who’s in Portugal. The one who helped me with the parking. That one.), who’s on his smoke break.

“I don’t understand it,” I said, loudly enough for him to overhear. “I swear I entered two people on the form. I’m so sorry, I don’t know how I screwed it up.”

“It’s okay,” Odin said. “You have a hotel room for the night. And I have my towel.”

I glanced at him.

“It’s hot. There are parks.”

We burst out laughing, and I said “No, I don’t want to stay here with these obnoxious Germans and without you. I’ll get whatever money I can get back from him, and Visa will give me back the rest.”

We sat in silence for a few more minutes, while I tried to come up with a solution for this hard math problem. Odin went back inside, and talked to the desk guy again.

Eventually he came out and fished his credit card and passport out of his wallet.

“The guy sitting there overheard us, and he told his man Benji to figure something out. Someone else booked a double room, but he’s only one person and he hasn’t checked in yet. So we pay a little more, he gets his money back, everything is fine.”

I laughed some more.

“See what you can get with a little smile?” Odin lectured me. “The guy said, since we weren’t losing our cool or yelling or anything, he wanted to help us. If we got mad, he would have done nothing.”

“Yeah, sure,” I grinned. “Let’s go up.”

A couple raindrops fell that evening as we set out to find the stadium, but I was still uncomfortably warm in my sweater. “Thinking about if I should bring this,” said Bo, indicating an extra hoodie. “I think it’ll be okay,” I said. “I don’t think we’ll need it, these things are always hot, and I wouldn’t want to carry it.”

He left it at the hostel. I had a raincoat too, but I left in the car, 2km away. It really was hot when we got to Berlin.

When we came out at the Olympic stadium though, with about 4000 other people (in that car alone), I started questioning my choice. Everyone else had raincoats on, and many had ponchos as well. A few more raindrops fell.

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As we followed the crowd down a broad footpath lined with sausage stands and beer gardens, the clouds got darker and more rain fell, and I remembered the part where “stadium” means “outdoor venue”. Odin was still looking cheerful though. “Want a drink, before we go in?” I suggested. “Do you have any cash?” “No.” “Alright”, We got beers, and I questioned that choice as well. Lunch was at noon, we never got dinner, it’s 6:30 now and the band won’t even be onstage til 9… should have gotten the sausages. And I think I just spent the last of Bo’s cash.

As we lined up at the gate, a guard pointed at a different impossibly long line stretching across the plaza. “Bag check over there”, he shouted. “Okay,” I shouted back.

Odin scouted the front of the line while I waited. A pedicab pulled up near the line, and a cheerful gentlemen got out with half a bottle of rosé and started taking selfies. When Odin came back, he said, “This is the right line, and they charge 2 euro per bag. What are you going to do?”

I checked my pockets – I had 40 cents.

“Well, I guess I could rob someone… or I could use whatever you have in your hand there.”

We fought our way through 70,000 stoked people to our seats in section 34, and I learned, to my deep and profound relief, that we were under cover. The rain wasn’t stopping.

In the row ahead of us, a woman couldn’t contain herself. As Noel Gallagher and the High Flying Birds chugged resentfully through Wonderwall, she was rocking out. She lost herself to dance. Her whole body had a song in it and that song needed the two seats adacent to her as well. Her boyfriend grooved a little more sedately and protected their beers.

Noel’s band were huddled under tents, and though they were soggy, they got through Champagne Supernova and Don’t Look Back In Anger, as well as a couple of their new songs, before packing it in. Once they left, crewmembers came out and swept an alarming amount of water off the stage, and seemed to have a disagreement about whether the tents were coming down or not. In the end they came down.

Edge showed his face on the catwalk a couple times, to riotous cheers, but he was just chatting with a security guard. We did a couple rounds of The Wave, and people kept on flooding down the stairs and packing tighter on the floor.

Finally around 9:30, Larry Mullen Jr, the drummer, came down the ramp and started up the drums. “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was the opening song, and with the first note the whole stadium came to their feet as one.

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The next couple hours were blurry for me. As the light faded, Bono ordered phones up, and everyone turned on their phone flashes and held them up. The stadium bowl turned into a galaxy. There’s a 40-foot high video screen, but the band weren’t on it for the first 4 songs or so. The people on the floor had the cheapest tickets, but to get a chance to buy those tickets, you have to be a paying member of the fan club for over six months. They take great pains to prevent floor tickets from going to scalpers, and the people who get into the front rows have to line up for hours before the gates even open.

They’re the true believers. U2 played Sunday, New Year’s Day, Bad, and Pride (in the name of love) just for them, on a catwalk extending out onto the floor. There was a Singin’ In The Rain singalong before they returned to the stage.

Next they started into the Joshua Tree, Streets playing while the video screens took us on a high speed trip through the desert. The show was a little light on politics, for a U2 show. The focus was on refugees and human rights, and Bono seemed to understand as few other people do, that railing about a narcissistic orange oompa loompa isn’t a good use of time.

They rolled out a massive flag with Malala Yousafzai’s face. She’s 20 and she won the Nobel Peace prize for her work in advocating for education for women and girls in developing countries. It was her birthday. The flag made a lap around the stadium, passed from hand to hand.

I thought the best song that night was Red Hill Mining town, a version totally reworked from the album version, with a Salvation Army brass band joining in on the video screen.

They took a break after the Joshua Tree, ripping wet clothes off as they left the stage, and came back for a solid 6 more songs encore. A girl came up on stage to dance in Mysterious Ways, standard practice. Bono grabbed the video camera that they keep specially for him, and took selfies with everyone. Whoever thinks that selfies are an annoying new trend started by 14 year olds is straight wrong. Bono has been doing it since film was invented.

During Ultraviolet, they did a cool thing showing a video from the HERstory project, founded by Alice Wroe, whose goal is to tell the stories of women who have made history. Someone is keeping a list of the people who were featured – http://www.u2songs.com/news/the_luminous_icons_of_ultra_violet_leg_two

For an egomaniac, Bono sure didn’t spend a lot of time on the video screen.

My first U2 album was Rattle and Hum when I was 10 or so, and I think I stole my brother’s copy. Next was All That You Can’t Leave Behind, followed by Achtung Baby and every other album after that. I’ve been memorizing lyrics and following their story since then, and it’s been my dream to see U2 in person. It took moving to Europe to finally succeed in getting tickets – they always sell out in seconds when they play Vancouver. Safe to say I was just as stoked as the guy in the seat right next to mine, who looked over his shoulder to flash a huge grin and a thumbs up every time a new song started, and having Odin the Norse god behind me with a solid good attitude made the show the best it could possibly have been. I recommend bringing your own viking if you ever have the chance.

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At five I knocked off work, ate some leftovers, and packed my bike on the car. I dressed up in the closest approximation of “serious cyclist” I could come up with – running tights, rain shirt, and hiking shoes – and secretly prayed that I would be late, no one else would show up, and I’d be spared the social pressure of introducing myself to a bunch of new Vikings. I came to Denmark one month ago and know hardly anyone yet. I’ve got to make some friends, but it’s still scary.

I was ten minutes early and the Vikings were very nice. The meetup spot is called Kirketorvet, and it’s a church on the east side of Kong Christian bridge in Sønderborg, Denmark. If you’re from Victoria, picture yourself standing at the lights on Pandora St facing the Johnson St bridge. To the right of the bridge there’s a building called the Janion – it occupies the same spot, both geographically (in the middle of town) and spiritually (overlooking the water), as Kirketorvet in Sønderborg.

The church steeple is Kirketorvet

I introduced myself to a couple of people, and failed like I always do to understand their names. There was a good mix of ages and at least a few women, and everyone was riding the same kind of bike as mine – hardtail mountain bikes with fat knobby tires. They all had more spandex, more plastic in their shoes, and more carbon on their bikes than I did, but I felt like I was close enough to pass. One lady let me know that though she was the slowest rider here, she was in charge of this horse race.

“Perfect,” I said. “I’ll be right behind you.”

First we did laps around a block adjacent to the church. We sprinted up a narrow lane, down a steep descent to the water, hooked hard left at the bottom, and scrambled up a stretch of twisty cobbles, then the same again three more times.

After that we rode along the water to the castle (Sønderborg Slot, complete with cannonball holes in it’s rocky flanks), which, if we’re still superimposing this town on Victoria, is more or less where Bastion Square is.

Sønderborg Slot

There’s a little woods near the castle. The others did four laps through the woods, dodging around some joggers, down a flight of stairs, and back along the paved path. I did three, with the self-proclaimed slowest of the pack trailing me encouragingly.

We continued along the water to the back lawn of Business College Syd, where they’ve got disc golf, a high ropes course, and a little piece of single track that we lapped four times. “I don’t like it,” said the leader, as we paused at 3.5. “The track is okay but the sprint across the lawn is annoying.”

“Ah,” I said. “Could I borrow some water?” I got to keep the water bottle.

We turned into the wind and continued up the coast. Sønder Skovy (Southern Forest) is criss-crossed with single and double track with hardly any underbrush. The ground is hard clay with not much roots or gravel. Except for the total lack of hills, I’d say it’s the perfect cross-country forest. Actually, if there were any hills it probably would have killed me, so no worries.

“I’ll stay with you for the first lap,” said my new friend, whose name I still haven’t learned. “So you can see the way. But take your own pace. We do two or three laps then stop for a break.” I nodded. “You’re okay?”

“I’m okay,” I said, “I just can’t go any faster! I’ll do two laps if the others do three, no problem.”

We ripped up a short distance of double track, a flat single track through the woods, then turned left along a cliff facing the ocean. We scooted up a ladder of roots in hard white clay, down the other side, and another single track through the woods to the starting point. The woods were crowded and we dodged around some more joggers – luckily they all wear highlighter jackets so you can see them coming. The wind was fierce and stirred up the ocean so it looked like there were almost enough waves to surf on, but it didn’t get through the trees.

Just a little bit choppy

After those laps we bumped through the woods on another little singletrack that was unmarked and invisible until we were on it, to another flat loop closer to the road. This one had a shallow but sharp ditch across the path, and a plank bridge. The others flew across them without pausing, but they still scared me a little. There was definitely a time when I was not as scared of tiny obstacles like this. I’m not sure what happened. Maybe some practice will get me past it.

As we turned back to town, I noticed that our group was smaller. I guess some people ride home and that’s where they split off, but I drove to the meeting spot so I had to go back. On the way back, though, the wind was with us and the return trip took half as long as the ride out. I talked to the other lady in the group. I don’t know her name either, but she’s a children’s nurse and said that I ought to come to beginners technical practice on Saturday morning. Since she’s the third person so far who has said I ought to do that, I guess I will.

I wore a helmet and everything

I’ve been riding my bike nearly every day since I was a teenager, but I never pushed myself like that. But it’s awesome. I think I had better keep doing it.

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I’m in Sønderborg. It’s a little town, kind of in the middle of nowhere by the Danish-German border. The house is in the countryside and the next door neighbours are horses, but everything you could possibly want is about a five minute drive away.

Bo is one of the viking gods I met on Camino last year. He owns the house, which is currently a second-hand shop. He also owns the car, which I’ve been driving while I try to figure out where things are.
Right now he’s turning one of his spare rooms into a living room so there will be someplace to sit down. Next week he’s going to move the shop to a new place a few miles away. I’m fairly sure he’s doing that because he wants to, not just because I’m here, though he says that he’s doing it for me. It’s a bit intimidating to think of someone undertaking such a huge amount of work for my sake. It doesn’t seem to bother him at all though. Last night he was painting the living room at 2 in the morning.

The government is giving me danish language lessons, but I think that won’t start until my id card comes in, maybe next week. Work doesn’t start till April 10th, either. In other words, I have absolutely no excuse not to be writing – and no pics, because my phone is trying to commit suicide.

27 March

There are some advantages to living in an antique shop. I was making carbonara for dinner, and couldn’t find a cheese grater. He ran off and made noise for a few minutes, and came back with one. From somewhere. Same with the coffee press, produced out of thin air. And a bicycle, and a bike lift.

The only thing I can’t find is empty space, but we cleared a little area in the front porch and mounted the bike lift in the rafters. This thing is an antique three-speed cycle path cruiser with a dyno light and a rat-trap rack. It has everything, it’s just a little dusty. I meant to buy a new bike when I got here, but I have a vision and it’s going to take a little time to find the bike that fits it. So I’m working on this one in the meantime.
It needs new tires, chain, headset and bottom bracket, and repairs for the hubs, dyno, and shifters. I can do about half of it myself, I think, and there’s a guy at the local bike shop who has a good attitude and says he can fix everything I can’t handle.

There’s a second local bike shop where the guy had a less good attitude and wanted to sell me a used bike that doesn’t meet my incredibly picky standards. So I’m getting to know the town. Here’s some pictures!

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It’s almost tax season and I enjoy taxes a little too much. You may have heard that wealthy corporations and millionaires avoid paying taxes and meanwhile the little people like yourself have to pay huge amounts. Want to act like a millionaire and avoid paying your taxes too? Let’s find out how.

I’m going to use an example of someone who makes $40k because that’s a nice round number, and also falls into the lowest Canadian tax bracket, ie the one you’re most likely to be in early in your career and before you’ve gotten a handle on how wealth works.

The first $11,474 on your paycheck is tax free. That leaves $28,526 that’s subject to a 15% income tax. Since that first 11-and-a-bit thousand doesn’t count, your average tax rate (in BC – other provinces are different) is 14.61%. You owe the government $5842 of your hard-earned and you get to keep $34,158. I’m sure they’ll spend it wisely. (Check the numbers yourself if you want, with SimpleTax’s calculator here.)

It’s pretty painless – the payroll person at your work will helpfully deduct 14% from your check each month so you never even see it, and in the spring your tax bill will be zero, or close to it. You might even get a return if payroll dude did the math wrong.

And that’s the end of it, I guess.

No, wait. I brought you here for a reason. Millionaires.

If you have a million dollars, it’s very easy to stash it all in an indexed mutual fund that will pay dividends, or capital gains, about about 7% a year. (Here’s some nice simple portfolios you can invest in that will get you returns like that.)

You can pay yourself 4%, reinvest 3%, and keep doing that infinitely. Basically never work again unless you feel like it. The capital will keep growing slowly if you withdraw at that rate, so you can just keep it up forever. 4 percent of a million is like $40,000. Convenient, hey? The exact same salary you get! Wouldn’t it be great to just get paid $40,000 a year forever, and never have to work for it? It’s possible, and all you have to do is start with a million bucks.

Okay, end sarcasm.

Someone who has a million dollars is rich, safe to say. Rich people should pay more taxes, right? That’s the whole point of the marginal tax rate, right? Only here’s the thing – only half of the capital gain is subject to income tax, and it’s taxed at your average tax rate. This millionaire did nothing but sit on his butt and watch grass grow this year, so he doesn’t have any job income, and only $20,000 in taxable capital income. His average tax rate is 4.3%.

So the millionaire only has to pay $1,784 tax on their $40,000 income.

The highest tax rate in Canada is 33%, if you make over $200,000, but a five-millionaire can make that much just by letting his dividends grow and still gets taxed at only 11%, a lower rate than you, who spent the whole year grinding for your 40 large.

Doesn’t that kind of suck? Wouldn’t you rather pay less? Like they do?

Let’s find out how. You need to get rid of $5842 in income, tout suite. The easiest way is to stash it in your RSP. Money in your RSP is tax free if you don’t withdraw it til you’re a thousand years old and not making money anymore, and at least it’s still yours. You can put 18% of your income in there each year, and your payroll person was going to take it off your paycheck anyway so its not like you were using it. Tell payroll to stop making deductions, and just put 14% of your paycheck directly into an indexed mutual fund as soon as you get paid. Then you can start making your own capital gains. If you don’t know how to do that there are lots of super good tutorials to get you started here: Canadian Couch Potato

Another fun one is medical expenses. It’s kind of bullshit, but there are quite a few medical expenses that our provincial healthcare won’t cover – glasses, physiotherapy, hearing aids and medical devices (like wheelchairs). But you can pay for them yourself and claim them as medical deductions. For myself, I got new glasses and a hearing aid this year, for a total of $2200. Of that I can claim $1187. You can get $200 for moving expenses too. Don’t forget to check if you have any educational amount leftover from school – it’s around $5000 a year and that carries over.

Contributions to charity, and, for some reason, political parties and churches, also work. I don’t agree with that philosophically, but those are the rules.

Reducing your taxable income this way as well will let you pay less for MSP as well. RSP and medical contributions are deducted from your net income, and if you get that down to 34,158 then your MSP bill will only be $56 this year, instead of the $72 it probably was last year (if you made 40,000 last year as well). Put just a little more in your RSP and get it under $34,000, and you will only have to pay $46. That’s almost a good deal for healthcare, even if it doesn’t cover wheelchairs. Hopefully it covers the cost of all those goddam envelopes they insist on sending out every month. There’s like 16 of them on my kitchen table now, all addressed to people who don’t live here anymore.

So maybe if you can act like a millionaire yourself, you can feel a little better about the ludicrously low taxes that rich people get to pay, and the punishingly high ones extracted from lower income people.

Look, I’m not against taxes. The role of the government, as I see it, is to protect the common resources. That means the land, the people, the water, the oil, all of it. I especially care about the weaker members of our society, the ones who end up on the street after trauma leads to mental illness and addictions, getting stuck in the poverty trap. I want to be compassionate to them and make sure they get what they need, and I want to chip in my share for it. But our provincial and federal governments act like it’s not their job. They act like selling our land and resources for stupid cheap prices to corporations and letting millionaires off the hook for income tax is a good idea, and they don’t look after people with the money they’ve got.

It’s frustrating. I think I can use my money more effectively than the government, and I will as much as I can, within the rules.

Hope this helps some of you save some money too.

*** I did my best to be accurate and cite sources, but please tell me if you see any discrepancies.

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This week I got to write a recursive function for the second time in my programming career. I’m always excited when this happens, and the event is so rare that it gets a blog post every time.

If you don’t know or care what recursion is, now’s the time to stop reading. Otherwise, we’re about to get technical, so pause your music and pay attention.

Recursion is a programming concept where a piece of code calls itself. It’s kinda hard to come up with a metaphor to explain this in non-programming terms – maybe think of a 3D printer that prints copies of itself. I dunno.

Anyway, I’ve been making a scoring application for my bike polo club. We’re having a tournament in January, and we’re not satisfied with the software options that are currently available.

Normal polo clubs use Podium. To use that, we have to get all our players to sign up for the League of Bike Polo and register themselves in our tournament with their teams, before the day of. The trouble is, our club hasn’t got its shit together. Hardly any of our players even know how to operate a computer, let alone sign up for LOBP. Besides that, our tournaments are traditionally mixers. That means you don’t choose your team – you throw your name in a hat and play with whoever you draw. We like it that way, because it keeps things low-key and egalitarian. The weakest player in the tournament still has a chance of scoring a few goals, and the winners are likely to be three strangers who have never played together before. It gives the Victoria players a chance to do okay, even though we’re playing against some of the best players in the world, who come over from Seattle and Vancouver.

So we don’t like Podium that much. (Though it is an excellent piece of software and a great contribution to the polo community!)

Jawn asked me to come up with something better last year. I think he asked me the year before as well. He asked a third time this year, with 4 months of run-up time, and this year I’m actually experienced enough to pull it off.

Instead of trying to master Javascript on the spot to create a fully browser-based application (that’s what I tried and choked on last time), I used the tools I’ve used on the job for the last three years – CakePHP and MySql. I use an older version of Cake, 1.3, at work, but my boss has been making noises about upgrading to 3.0 lately, and this was a good chance to learn how to use the newer version. So CakePHP 3.0 is the framework.

Setting up the framework on a borrowed server from work took a day or two. Figuring out how to create a plugin from the command line, then controllers, models, and views, took another week or so. Once the wiring was sorted out, I started on logic. Our user, in this case one Jawn Fawn, creates teams. Each team can have three players. They’re drawn out of a hat (in real life) then entered on a form (in the app). The teams are added to a tournament, and then you get a nice table with all your teams displaying.

Click a big plus sign to start a round, and you get… what?

Well, in the first version, you got a list of teams matched up at random. Winners get two points, ties get one point each, losers get nothing. So after a round, teams are sorted by how many points they’ve got, and then the teams with more points play each other and the teams with less points play each other. This makes sense to me, it’s a fair way of determining who the best player in a tournament is.

Except, that’s not really our goal. No one who plays polo in Victoria cares who the best player is. We’re here to get rowdy and drink in public. The weather is always terrible. Sometimes there’s soup, but the soup is usually cold. Showing each other up is the last thing on our minds.

No, the goal is to make sure that every team plays every other team, and that repeats happen as seldom as possible. Last week, I demoed the app to Jawn, and to my total shock, he didn’t care about my pretty ajax interface or the nice bubble display of complete matches. The first thing he asked was, “So if Big Country and the Beavers have the same score in round three…. they play each other again?”

And I’m like, “Yeah, I guess so?”

“Well that’s no good”, said Jawn. “The whole problem is that I don’t want to have to keep track of making sure teams don’t play each other too often.”

“Ok, I’ll give it another try.”

As usual in programming, the last 10% of the problem takes 80% of the development time. That’s basically what happened here, and it took another whole week to come up with an algorithm and an implementation that worked. Here it is, with lots of comments. It appears to be working, according to my tests, but I haven’t tested much. Still have to bug Jawn to kick it until it breaks. For some reason, he doesn’t drop what he’s doing and immediately start testing when I send him a demo, I have no idea what’s up with that.

Two things frustrated me for a whole day each. One was the part where the function calls itself. I was calling the function and then returning the array of matches. Instead, I need to return the function call within a conditional statement (if there are more unmatched teams, recurse…), and only return the matches when the condition is not met.

Second, I forgot the “break;” at the end of the foreach loop. It’s important. That was the “break”-through that let me finish it today.

Finally, the reason it had to be recursive in the first place. You grab the first item on the list of teams, then iterate the rest of the list until a match is found. What if no match is found? You have to iterate again. And so, you call the function again.